All content needs dates
Jonathan Snook1 shocked me today with this comment about his new site design:
True story: I didn’t add dates to the articles on my home page so you can’t [easily] tell how long I go without blog updates.
I struggle as much as the next writer with producing content at regular intervals. Maybe that’s precisely why dates are so vital on the web. Things change, and information goes stale fast. New vistors hitting your site wonder, “Is this site dead?” or “Have I read that already?” If they’re considering subscribing to a feed of your content, they often first wonder, “Are the updates overly frequent?” Jonathan’s suggestion is that they subscribe and find out, but in my experience that’s not how users work. Without dates, content like a blog or news page looks dead.
Dates on articles are even more important, and although they’re rarely omitted, they’re often too subtle or missing key information like the year. People who hit an article from elsewhere want to know, “What’s the context of this? How likely is it to be still true?” I frequently have this problem on corporate sites, where you’re left wondering if the “Cool new Gizmos to launch this summer” still means this summer. Even the almighty 37signals doesn’t give the year on their blog – even if the posts are years old!
My approach is to display full dates everywhere, bolding the day on the index page and the year on the article pages. There are a lot of other options, but for your users’ sake – pick one!
- A web designer I respect a lot, have met in person, and who also sports a rockin’ .ca domain. [↩]
Feb 4 2009
11:46 pm
Didn’t I have to convince you once while you were here that relative dates sucked? (“Last updated: about a week ago.”) :)
Feb 5 2009
1:43 am
I think relative dates are good sometimes. The biggest win is with very recent times – for comments on iWork.com we do Today, Yesterday, Date, then Date with Year as time passes. In situations where you’re seeing a lot of data (mail for example) they’re more appropriate than when you’re looking at one value (a single article for example).
Feb 6 2009
1:59 pm
Relative dates are perfectly reasonable in a list, agreed. Mail is awesome this way, showing different detail dates if there’s limited space.
But “Last updated: about a week ago” is isolation ALWAYS sucks. :)
Feb 7 2009
4:04 pm
I think most meta-data is overrated, at least in the context of weblog posts. It can be distracting if not applied subtly, and can represent a disturbing amount of text on a page (compared to actual content). Post dates should go somewhere, but most weblogs pay far too much attention to them (and too little to the actual content).
Feb 16 2009
10:31 am
I have no dates on my pages whatsoever, for similar reasons to the original quote. However, I’m swayed by having a date solely for the purposes of determining continued validity. Maybe I’ll just provide a year?
Feb 16 2009
10:32 am
What’s more interesting is I’d like to move to a wider format, if only to make code listings neater.
Feb 16 2009
2:51 pm
I think for article pages, the year is the most important thing. Not only do I highlight that part of the date, but my article URLs include the year. Some people include the full date in their URLs, but I have no idea why this became a standard.